![]() ![]() ![]() While the theme of a young man who deserts his older mistress is a familiar one, in this novel, Colette makes it her own. The story of a love affair between L a, a still-beautiful 49-year-old ex-courtesan, and Ch ri, a handsome but selfish young man 30 years her junior, it offers a superb study of age and sexuality, written in a personal style that reveals the author's keen powers of observation. Published when the author, like her heroine, was in her late 40s, Ch ri is a delicate analysis of a May-December romance. By the time Ch ri was published in 1920, Colette had become well known both as a writer and as a personality and was entering a period of rich personal growth and happiness. But eventually she broke free of this unhappy marriage and took flight on her own, as a fiction writer, a journalist, and an actress. Her husband, a Parisian man-about-town and the son of a major publisher, made use of her literary talents by publishing her first several novels under his own name - his only changes, evidently, being to make them more prurient. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954), one of the most popular and best loved of modern French writers, became known simply as Colette when she married in 1893. ![]()
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